end of the season of exhaustion

after swn we sat back and though, "my, my! it will be nice to have a rest!" and then realised that the beerfest was only days away. yikes! beerfest is notable for a) massive selection of beers b) about 4000 people in chapter. more busy times! we also had noticed that a lot of people are checking out chapter, where we were expecting quite a few people to be walking through the doors we're having lots and lots and lots coming to have a gawp, which is great but we've all been rushed off our feet! every day has been a busy and we're all getting that adrenalin rush of talking to a billion people followed by the falling-asleep-the-moment-you-stop comedown.

to try and put some nice escapist distance between us and them i took steen to see KATALIN VARGA on monday. it was a really strange but wonderful experience. katalin varga is woman out for revenge. this is a modern romanian film (from a british director) that almost feels like a dark fairy tale. due to the slightly old fashioned dress in the smaller villages that gives the impression of a place stuck in time it feels like this is a story that could have happened at any time. after carrying the secret of the truth of her son's real father for 10 years she confides in a friend who quickly spreads it around the village. her husband kicks her out and she ventures out into the countryside with her son searching for something, someone to carry out her revenge upon. there are some wonderful moments that feel uncomfortable and make you frightened of the nature in a similar way to ANTICHRIST. nature, or human nature, is brutal and life has no meaning but is brutish and unfair. a wonderful film that i could not get out of my head afterwards.

for the next two days my mornings were spent at the half term screening of CLOUDY WITH A CHANCE OF MEATBALLS. this was a fun tale, a nicely surreal cartoon about a young inventor who goes from zero to hero in his seaside town after his new invention is accidentally shot in the sky and food literally rains down. it was a classic tale of how a young lad can be corrupted by fame and glory with a horrid, ever expanding mayor who wants more more more without thinking of the concequences and a nice reverse makeover of a dumb bimbo weathergirl who turns out to be a beautiful nerd underneath all along. it was well designed for kids and adults but didn't seem too clever, like a lot of the modern pixar cartoons seem to be. there was an entertaining monkey called steve, a defecating cloud and i loved all the depictions of giant food. ace!

thursday evening was a real treat, the HARMONIE BAND contributed live music to the carl dreyer classic VAMPYR, it is a talkie but as it is an early film has little dialogue so it suited being transferred to a live score. i had seen stills from this film before but never had been able to see it properly and was stunned by the beauty of the film. a young man enters a cut off village full of sad lost souls and has to spend the night in an inn. he is awakened during the night by an old man who enters his room and leaves a package so he gets up and walks around to try and find out what has happened, he passes a castle with an old woman and a doctor and then comes across the old man's house and witnessess his death. the man had two daughters, one of whom we learn has been bitten by a vampire. he calls the doctor who tells him the daughter needs a blood transfusion, which the young man readily agrees to. he falls into a sleep and when he wakes realises the doctor is not all he seems. i was very tired when i saw this film, it was the end of a long couple of weeks, a long day and i must admit that i started to drift into that strange place between waking and sleeping for a few minutes at the start. it added a strange frission to my enjoyment of the film. i started to drift just as the young man was in the first few scenes and awoke to find the image of the old man creeping, almost gliding into the room and it was extremely creepy. all through the film were shots of extreme beauty, the light quality was very subtle and it reminded me most of the murnau film SUNRISE. it was claustrophobic and perhaps aided by how tired i was, had a hypnotic seductive quality. i felt i was truly under a spell.

after that i rushed off to newport to catch the last MEZEFEST gig. it was a good one too! i jumped off the train first up was LITTLE DEATHS, a brilliantly unexpected math rock treat. they were unpretentious and seemed to be genuinely enjoying themselves which is something you rarely see with such musos. next up was MIDORI HIRANO. i saw her at a LOOSE gig earlier in the year and it seems that despite that there seemed to be a low turn out for her, which is a shame because her music is so beautiful, she seems so shy and eager for people to enjoy it. it reminds me of icebergs melting and light falling on grass, its just so delicate and subtle. the next lot up were a horrible bunch of rapping boys with plastic looking hair. i read my book in the back room instead. they were called DIRTY GOODS and they had day-glo merch and customised goggles. ugh. luckily MAX TUNDRA was up next. he is someone i saw earlier in the year too but unfortunately it didn't quite count. that evening i started throwing up and that kept me in the toilet for the entire gig. poor max tundra, i don't think it was his fault. he came on stage and lo! he didn't make me vom. he was very funny, brilliant dance moves and little gems of songs that made me dance with a small little bunch of lovelies at the front. a brilliant show that enabled me to neglect my tiredness for a while. i dashed out just before the end to make sure i could collect my bike from the train station (a man let me keep it in the staff room because we couldn't find the bike racks!) and slept well that night!

bloody good i did get some sleep because it was the CHAPTER OKTOBERFEST that weekend and i was doing the looong shift on friday. i started at 6pm (2 hours earlier than usual) and finished at 2am (about an hour longer than usual) and it was hard. there were times when i thought people were just drinking really quickly because i seemed to be serving them a lot and by the end of the evening i worked out that it was just the time going quickly and being too busy to take stock and wonder what time it was! chapter dealt with it really well and we had a record breaking weekend as far as i can tell, i find out the true figures this week. it was great to be able to have the space not to have a one-in-one-out system like we had to do for the stwidio cafe bar.

by the next day i felt like i had been battered and bruised by all the tiredness so it was a quiet hallowe'en for us. we had plans to go and see the lovely multi talented rhodri viney then go dancing in TWISTED but first i was ushering EDDIE LADD: THE BOBBY SANDS MEMORIAL RACE in the theatre. i love eddie's shows, she has such a wonderful muscular energy. she has a lithe, androgynous look and it combines with her femininity to make her a graceful, beautiful performer. the idea for this came when she discovered that a town in america has a memorial race each year for hunger striker bobby sands. he wrote an article about running and ladd uses the sport and the idea of the marathon, going the distance as an allegory for his form of protest. in the centre of the stage is a line of lasers running down the length of a giant treadmill. voices echo around, a northern irish voice (bobby sands' writings) and the welsh translation (eddie ladd's commentary) telling of how he was a runner in school and then got sent to prison and tells the tale of him trying to keep up, striving to keep pace. she stands on the treadmill and it gathers speed. the click click and the hum of the machine providing an interesting backdrop to the atmospheric music from guto puw. through the words and her movements we imagine bobby sands running, running, trying to make it to the end. it is a very powerful piece and the lighting was so subtle she seemed to go from fit and lithe to fragile and sinewy by the end.

present at the show were our friends anne and helen and since the show had finished too late to catch mr viney we went back for a cup of tea at theirs. very rock and roll. but by gum, it was nice. we just sat and ate biscuits and drank tea and had a chat and i think it was the quietest hallowe'en i've had for years but it was perfect.

it was a good end to a bloody brilliant but exhausting month. november is looming and there are a couple of big things on the horizon there. i keep saying its going to slow down but i'm not sure if it is! its great working here and living with steen and seeing so many brilliant bands all the time but i do keep having to remind myself to sleep!